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Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

Jonathan Lambert

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

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In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman , draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

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"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp , a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing " sync up " with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer , a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley , a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive , and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

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Do I Print or Hand-Write an Essay?

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In most cases, you should print your essays on a computer. While handwritten essays may be appropriate for small assignments, necessary for in-class work or even required for certain college applications, work printed from a computer is easier to read and widely accepted as the most professional format for submitting essays.

Benefits of Typing

Typed essays look professional and are easy to read. They are also easy for you to edit -- copying and pasting is much simpler and neater than erasing and rewriting. While not foolproof, word processing programs can pick up on some grammatical and spelling errors. They also make it easy to insert images, tables or footnotes where necessary. Finally, typing an essay provides you with a backup copy.

Benefits of Handwriting

If you have the choice to hand-write or type an essay, it may sometimes be better to hand-write. Research published in the peer-reviewed electronic journal "Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation" found that handwritten essay drafts scored higher than the exact same essays typed, with more neatly handwritten essays scoring better than messier essays. Handwritten essays made graders feel closer to the essay-writer, and graders were more likely to believe the essays were completed through hard work. Computer-typed essays felt more like a final copy than a first draft, and thus were graded more stringently. Despite these results, keep in mind that if you are required to type an essay, a handwritten essay likely will not be accepted, and you could receive a zero for your work. Additionally, these handwritten essays were drafts, not final copies. Finally, this study presented graders with the same essays, but other studies show that typing may result in a better written essay, particularly if you are accustomed to typing.

Rules of Handwritten Essays

There are no hard-and-fast rules for hand-writing an essay, but here are some good ones to follow. Write neatly -- cursive may be more difficult to read than print. Write on lined paper in blue or black ink, using the red line on the side of the page as your left margin. You may want to use only one side of the paper, particularly if ink bleeds through. Double-spacing (leaving an extra line) may help you make room for possible edits. Number your pages. Above all, follow any specific instructions your teacher gives you.

Rules of Typed Essays

Essays should be typed in a readable font -- this means you should use a traditional font, such as Times New Roman, Arial or Georgia (and not a font like Curlz or Comic Sans). Use only one space after a period. Print in black and on one side of the paper. Generally, text should be left-justified and double-spaced. Number your pages. Do not try to increase the length of your essay by changing page margins, which should usually be one inch. Make sure to use spell-check. Staple your paper in the upper-left corner. Above all, follow your instructor's specific rules for formatting.

• Purdue OWL: Using Fonts With Purpose

Paige Johansen has been writing professionally since 2003. She holds a B.A. in psychology and English from Cornell University and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from The University of Virginia. Between degrees, she worked in the fashion industry for two years.

What to Expect From a College English Class

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• 1 What to Expect From a College English Class
• 2 How Are the Titles of Longer Works Written in MLA Style?
• 3 How to Write a Good College Level Essay
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Easy Ways to Get Good Handwriting

Last Updated: March 31, 2024 Fact Checked

Analyzing Your Handwriting

Changing your handwriting.

This article was co-authored by Courtney Copriviza and by wikiHow staff writer, Devin McSween . Courtney Copriviza is an Elementary School Teacher based in Maui, HI. Courtney specializes in elementary education, classroom management, and social and emotional development. She holds a BA in Communication with a minor in Urban Education and an MA in Teaching from Santa Clara University. Courtney has also taught high school in Madrid, Spain. She is a member of Kappa Delta Pi International Honors Society in Education. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 4,098,120 times.

We’ve all been there: you’re reviewing your lecture notes but can’t seem to make out your words as they run together and tilt off the page. It would be great if you didn’t have to decode your own writing, so is there any way you can make it better? Whether you’re trying to reign in unruly letters or get back your handwriting flair from years ago, we’ll show you the techniques to use to improve your handwriting. Read on to learn how!

Things You Should Know

• Find handwriting inspiration online to develop your handwriting style. Copy your favorite letters to incorporate them into your writing.
• Write out the alphabet to make your letters consistent. Then, practice writing full sentences.
• Hand write things every chance you get. Write out work to-dos, school notes, start a journal, and send letters to friends.

• Look at the size of your letters in relation to each other, too. Capital letters should be larger than lowercase ones, while tall letters like “t” should extend past small letters like “a.”

• You don’t have to adopt an entirely new style or copy someone else’s word for word. Just pick and choose certain aspects of different styles to incorporate the shapes and letters into your writing and make them your own.

• Your general posture can help improve your writing, too. Wiggle your wrist to loosen it and relax your shoulders as you write.

• When you find the type of pen or pencil you like, experiment with different lead sizes and pen tips to find what thickness makes your handwriting pop, too.

• If writing the same phrase over again gets tiring, write down some of your favorite quotes and song lyrics, or practice your own name.

• To practice your writing every day, start a journal , make your to-do lists by hand, or complete handwriting practice sheets.

Community Q&A

Handwriting Practice Page

• Writing equal sized letters makes your handwriting look neat and tidy. Thanks Helpful 20 Not Helpful 1
• Use lined paper to help keep your writing straight. Stay on the line, only taking the letters above or below it as required by the letter's shape (e.g. “q,” “y” and “g”). Thanks Helpful 17 Not Helpful 0
• Aim to write at least one paragraph each day to help improve your handwriting. Thanks Helpful 15 Not Helpful 5

Tips from our Readers

• Writing with a gel pen on smooth paper can make your lines flow better.
• Try using a pencil gripper to change your grip.

• Don't press the nib, or tip, of your pen hard on the paper as you write. Pressing down hard can cause your hand to cramp, so keep your pressure even. Thanks Helpful 23 Not Helpful 3
• Don't throw away your templates or practice sheets. Use these as guidelines as you write to see how the letters should look and what you need to improve. Thanks Helpful 14 Not Helpful 3
• To prevent writer's cramp, use your wrist and arm to support your hand. Then, relax your grip on your pen or pencil. Thanks Helpful 13 Not Helpful 4
• Reuse your practice sheets and paper as much as you can to prevent excess waste. Use the front and back of each sheet and write in the margins. Thanks Helpful 12 Not Helpful 6

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.popsci.com/diy/how-to-improve-handwriting/
• ↑ https://realtytimes.com/agentnews/agentadvice/item/8744-20060406_handwriting
• ↑ https://www.businessinsider.com/tips-to-improve-handwriting-2014-7
• ↑ https://www.nhsggc.org.uk/kids/resources/ot-activityinformation-sheets/holding-a-pencil/
• ↑ ​​ https://masgrimes.com/journal/how-to-improve-your-handwriting
• ↑ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21395194/
• Videos provided by Katie Angel

About This Article

To get better handwriting, write so there's enough space between each of your words to fit an imaginary letter "O," and make sure you're writing your letters straight, not slanted. Practice writing with smooth, even lines instead of lines that are squiggly and uneven. Write every day, and handwrite your notes whenever you get a chance so you can keep improving. To learn about how to fix slants and get better line quality while you write, keep reading the article! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Full-page handwriting recognition and automated essay scoring for in-the-wild essays

• Published: 13 March 2023
• Volume 82 , pages 35253–35276, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Annapurna Sharma   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4661-6826 1 ,
• Rohit Katlaa 1 ,
• Gurleen Kaur 1 &
• Dinesh Babu Jayagopi 1  

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Scoring of handwritten essays in school education settings is a time-consuming task. Normalized assessment and prompt feedback enable a student to improve the articulation, comprehension and overall presentation of ideas. In this work, we present a system that can take in input as the images of the essay sheets and outputs the grade/score of the essay. We show a pipelined approach by combining a handwriting recognition model and automated essay scoring. Current handwriting recognition systems show an excellent transcription performance on the existing public domain dataset. These datasets are primarily captured in a constrained manner. The performance and efficacy of these models on unconstrained data are crucial for text understanding. In our work, we adapt an existing full-page handwriting recognition model to the unconstrained handwritten essay dataset. The full page handwriting recognition model is a deep learning model based on CNN and LSTM layers with explicit modules to identify the start of line, line normalization and text line recognition. The unconstrained dataset is from a national essay competition where students upload the essay after scanning the essay. This dataset is wild in nature as the background, margins, text-fonts and the scanning device make it challenging both visually and algorithmically.We have curated a subset of this dataset for all the experiments in this work and intend to make this dataset publicly available. We further analyze the performance on the downstream task of essay scoring using a set of classical handcrafted features and transformer-based contextual embeddings.We have formulated the problem of essay scoring as a regression task. The pre-trained embeddings/handcrafted features, for each essay, are used as representative features for the essay scoring model. Our results show that there is only a slight performance degradation in the essay scoring task due to transcription errors from the handwriting recognition module. We also show analysis with rubric level scores and handcrafted features to develop a subset of features that directly impact the rubric level score on the essay.

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Sharma, A., Katlaa, R., Kaur, G. et al. Full-page handwriting recognition and automated essay scoring for in-the-wild essays. Multimed Tools Appl 82 , 35253–35276 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14558-z

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Handwriting vs. Typing: Which Is Better?

Kyle A. Massa

So... do you handwrite your work, or do you type it? Or both? If you’re exclusively one or the other, do you ever wonder what it’s like to dabble in the other method?

In this article, we’ll look at why you might want to make the switch. Let’s get started!

The Case for Handwriting

The case for typing, which is better.

Handwriting is certainly the older of these two methods. Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet at his local Starbucks on a Macbook Air, after all. Therefore, handwriting carries a certain gravitas that typing doesn’t. I know when I’ve handwritten my work, it’s felt somehow more profound than my digital work. Maybe that’s because it’s immediately tangible—or maybe it’s the weight of history.

I’ve also found that handwriting offers fewer distractions than typing. When I type on my computer, I sometimes get pulled away by an incoming email or disappear down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Not so with handwriting. When we sit down with our notebooks, we’re far less likely to get distracted and far more likely to focus on the writing itself.

The last thing (and maybe not that important, but still): Nothing makes you feel like a writer more than handwriting. If someone observes another person on a computer, for example, there are so many things that person might be doing. Maybe they’re coding, web surfing, online shopping, etc. But if you’re filling page after page with words, sentences, and paragraphs, there’s no mistaking you. You’re a writer!

So far as I’m aware, most everyone types faster than they write. That’s important for me since I do my writing in the morning before work, so I only have a two-hour window to hit my word count. If I wrote by hand, I don’t think I’d reach my mark.

Typing helps in the editing stages, too. It’s far easier to revise passages, splice two documents together, or rearrange entire chapters. Not so much with a handwritten piece. Note: This is especially relevant for novelists. Often, when writing such a long story, we’re going to have chapters that don’t work, passages that need to be reordered, or new chapters that need to be inserted. This is all nearly impossible to do with handwriting, but fairly easy by typing on a computer.

Finally (and perhaps most importantly for those reading this article), you can’t run handwritten work through ProWritingAid ! That means issues like repeated words, sticky sentences, and grammatical gaffes might go unnoticed. Not good for a serious writer such as yourself.

This question ultimately comes down to personal preference. I hope this article gets your brain pumping, but ultimately, the decision is yours. Try both and see which works best for you.

I did. In fact, I used to handwrite all my fiction. I had several notebooks that I filled with words every day before work. I liked them because they were portable, and I often found myself working from my parked car.

However, once I started submitting the short stories I’d written, I quit handwriting and moved to typing. Why? Because I always ended up typing my work, anyway! No short story market is going to accept a handwritten story, no matter how good it might be. So, since I transcribed my work onto the computer, I figured I’d save myself the extra step and stick to typing.

Mind you, that change didn’t come without cost. I think I tend to be much sloppier while typing than I was while handwriting. Forming each letter with a pen mandates a heightened level of attention; I felt I was able to concentrate more on my writing while handwriting than typing. (And it doesn’t hurt that my notebook is sans an internet browser.)

Nonetheless, I’ve decided that the time savings are worth a slip in attention every now and then. The only way for you to decide for yourself is to try both methods.

Which have you used? Which do you prefer? Let us know in the comments below!

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Kyle A. Massa is the author of the short fiction collection Monsters at Dusk and and the novel Gerald Barkley Rocks. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and their two cats. Learn more about Kyle and his work at his website, kyleamassa.com.

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Teachers bringing back handwritten work in light of ai, a survey by intelligent.com found that two-thirds of high school teachers and college instructors are rethinking their assignments, and three-quarters of those teachers are planning to require handwritten work..

How to digitize your handwritten notes or copy text from a photo

OK, I admit it. I’m a sucker for the latest gadget. I bought a smart notebook with all the upgrades to write my daily to-do lists digitally. Yeah, $600 later, I’ve used it eleven times.

It’s easy to waste money on tech. Tap or click for ways you might be throwing away money and solutions to help you save.

If you’re not getting enough life out of your gadgets, you can fix that, too. Tap or click for 8 ways you’re ruining your PC.

The truth is, I like the feeling of an actual pen on paper. Maybe you do, too, but that doesn't mean you can't digitize all your notes for easier searching and sorting. Here's how:

Get smart (notes)

Ever wish you could turn your handwritten notes into something you can search or edit on your computer, phone, or tablet? You could take a picture, but that has a few limitations. You won't be able to search for certain phrases or edit the text. You need something made for the job.

A terrific way to get a handwritten note into your computer is to use the app Evernote . You simply take a picture of the note, and Evernote turns it into a searchable document. You can also organize your notes in folders and with labels.

You can also try Microsoft’s OneNote app . You take a picture of your writing and, like Evernote, can organize things into notebooks and pages.

Pro tip: Keep in mind the apps only work well with legible handwriting. If they aren’t picking up your notes, you’re going to have to slow down a bit.

Speaking of digitizing, what about all your old photos? Tap or click for an easy way to scan without buying a scanner.

Bonus tip: How to copy text from a photo

Apple's latest major iPhone update, iOS 15, has many handy features to make life easier. Tap or click here for some of my favorites.

Here’s one I especially like: The Live Text feature allows you to scan, search and share text in photos and images.

Note: You’ll need an iPhone XS, XR, or later with iOS 14 installed.

This is great to translate text that can't be copied and pasted or find a photo with specific wording in it. It also works for phone numbers. Simply snap a photo of a package, for instance, and you can call the number in just a couple of quick clicks.

It doesn’t just work with your photos, either. You can use the camera app to scan for text around you.

To scan for information in photos and images, first, make sure the function is activated. Tap the Settings app, go to General and then to Language & Region . Enable Live Text by toggling it on .

Open the Photos app for photos on your camera roll and select the image you want to scan. Touch and hold over the text in the picture, and the grab points will appear around it. You will see several options to copy, select all text, translate, or share.

To identify text with your camera, open the camera app and point it at the text. The indicator icon will be available in the bottom right corner when the app detects text in the viewfinder. Tap the icon.

From there, you can select the text in the same way as described above. To cancel the capture, tap on the screen and the image will disappear.

Digital Life Hacks: Smart digital tips you need to know

Check out my podcast “Kim Komando Explains” on Apple , Google Podcasts , or your favorite podcast player.

Over the years, I have made it my mission to share quick tips and advice to make your digital life easier. These are all those clever hacks you won't find buried in a user manual. In this episode, my team and I share smart new tech know-how, from a safer way to share passwords to turning your handwritten notes digital.

Listen to the podcast here or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for my last name, “Komando.”

Learn about all the latest technology on the  Kim Komando Show , the nation's largest weekend radio talk show. Kim takes calls and dispenses advice on today's digital lifestyle, from smartphones and tablets to online privacy and data hacks. For her daily tips, free newsletters and more, visit her website at  Komando.com .

The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Writing Experience — Importance of handwriting

Importance of Handwriting

• Categories: Writing Experience

About this sample

Words: 361 |

Published: Mar 28, 2019

Words: 361 | Page: 1 | 2 min read

Works Cited:

• Adichie, C. N. (2004). Purple hibiscus. Algonquin Books.
• Ang, I. (2001). Silent citizenship: Critical citizens and cultural politics. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(2), 165-181.
• Bonham, V. (2011). "Women’s voices will not be silenced": Women and silence in contemporary Nigerian fiction. Research in African Literatures, 42(3), 119-133.
• Clark, A. H. (2010). A rhetorical analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk, "The Danger of a Single Story." Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, 1(1), 1-9.
• De Weerdt, Y. (2013). The silence of women in African literature: A comparative analysis of Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi. Journal of International Women's Studies, 14(3), 91-105.
• Groom, H. (2012). Religion and silence in the fiction of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 47(1), 53-68.
• Hadjioannou, M. (2016). "You are a story": Silence, storytelling, and feminist resistance in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novels. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 62(1), 61-80.
• O'Callaghan, E. (2013). A comparison of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 48(2), 269-286.
• Ogundimu, F. (2014). Culture, violence and narrative strategies in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus. Nordic Journal of African Studies, 23(2), 90-103.
• Zajicek, A. M. (2017). The sound of silence: Contemporary Nigerian women writers and the question of voice. Women's Studies, 46(2), 127-142.

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How To Write Book Titles The Proper Way: A Complete Guide For Writers

• February 10, 2022

Book titles within essays or papers can be tricky. There are specific rules that are given for how to include a book title in a way that sets it apart from the content of your writing given by the Modern Language Association. However, as with many other things in life, there are exceptions to the rules. This article will guide you through the rules of the writing style guides so that you can include a book’s title in your paper or essay correctly.

How to write book titles:

Style guides and book titles.

When it comes to book titles within text, there are a few different style guides that have rules you can follow, depending on your writing type. The three types that you will encounter most often are; MLA style, Chicago manual of style, and APA. A writing instructor will usually tell you what style guide you are expected to use for a particular essay or paper.

MLA Style Guide

The MLA handbook states that you should always italicize book titles when styling book titles within your text. The exception to this rule are religious texts. You would not italicize the Holy Bible or the sacred books or titles of other religions. Note the following example.

Pam had stayed most of the summer indoors, re-reading her favorite book series. She was already up to  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone , and she didn’t regret not being more active or going outside.

In the above example, the book title is italicized. Fiction titles and nonfiction titles alike must be in italics when within the text.

Series Titles in MLA

In the above example, a book from a series was used. But what if the text had not specified which book from the series Pam was reading? Would it still need to be in italics? The answer is: in this case, yes. In other cases, sometimes.

It’s really not as confusing as it seems. When you are talking about a book series but don’t want or need to include the complete series titles for the purposes of your work, you only have to put words in italics that also appear in the book titles. So, because  Harry Potter  is part of the title of all of the books in the series, you would italicize his name every time you mention the book.

However, if you were talking about Katniss Everdeen, you would not have to do this, as the book series she is featured in doesn’t use her name in the titles of  The Hunger Games  series. The same would be true of books like the Nancy Drew books.

Quotation Marks

There are instances in which titles should be placed inside of quotation marks within a paper or essay. This is done when you cite the titles of poems , a chapter title, short stories, articles, or blogs.

So, for example, if you were to write a paper that featured a poem from a book, you would put the book title in italics and the poems cited in quotation marks.

An example of an enduring love poem is “Annabel Lee” from  The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. 

Chapter Title

Another time that quotation marks should be used is when using the title of a chapter. If you are citing a specific chapter of a book, you would enclose the title of the chapter in quotation marks, and the title of the book should be in italics.

The desperation and sadness of a man on death row can be seen in the “Wild Wind Blowing” chapter of Norman Mailer’s  The Executioner’s Song. 

Short Stories

Short stories are another case. Much like the title of a chapter or poem, in which the title is placed in quotation marks, while the title of the book or collection it is found in is italics. The same can be said for sections, stories, or chapters cited within a literary journal.

Stepping away from his norm of horror and gore, Stephen King writes of trust, love, and regret in his story “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” which can be found in his short story collection  Night Shift. 

Punctuation Marks

If you are citing a story or title that includes question marks, you need to make sure to italicize the question mark when citing. Keep all punctuation, such as a question mark, comma, ellipses, colon, or exclamation mark, as it is in the original individual books.

If you want a funny and irreverent read, you’ve got to try  Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea.  Chelsea Handler has done a phenomenal job of being vulgar, relatable, and explaining life from her viewpoint in this hilarious and memorable book.

The Digital Age: Are Book Titles Underlined Anymore?

MLA style used to dictate that a book title should either be in italics or underlined. However, that is no longer the case. As computers started to take over as the major tool used in writing, it became unpopular to underline book titles. Therefore, this rule was dropped from the style guides.

However, it should be mentioned that when handwriting an essay or research paper, many instructors prefer that you underline book titles, as it’s relatively difficult to handwrite italics. If you are in a writing course or a class that is heavy on handwritten work, be sure to ask your instructor or teacher which method they prefer for citing a book title.

How to Come Up with Book Title Ideas

Now that quotation marks, italics, and style guides have been discussed, let’s move on to how you can come up with your own book title. If you’d like a title for your book that sounds interesting and will get a reader’s attention, you may find this article helpful.

Coming up with a good title for your book is a challenging yet essential marketing decision . The right title can make your target audience choose your new book off of the shelf instead of another writer’s work. Your book cover and your book title are quite possibly the most important marketing decisions you will make.

How to Choose a Good Book Title

Certain criteria should be met if you want to have a good book title , and there are specific steps involved in getting there. You may have assumed up until now that titles of books were just spur of the moment decisions made by authors or publishers, but a lot of work goes into writing good titles.

Grab the Reader’s Attention

As a general rule, you want your reader to remember your title and to sound interesting, even without the reader having seen the cover. There are several ways to do this. You can be a little dark with your title, be controversial, provoke the reader, or even be funny.

There are many examples of such works that use memorable and attention-seeking titles. The following are some different titles that are effective and would most likely provoke a reader to grab them from a shelf for closer inspection.

• Burn After Writing (Sharon Jones)
• Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
• Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (Mindy Kaling)
• Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea (Chelsea Handler)
• The Devil Wears Prada (Lauren Weisberger)
• Chicken Soup for the Soul (various authors)
• God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (Kurt Vonnegut)

Shorter Titles

If your full title for your book is long, you may end up boring a reader or creating a situation where a reader tries to remember the title of your book, but it’s too long and ends up getting it confused with another book. Although you should always do your best to make sure that there aren’t books by other authors that share a title or have a title similar to your book (more on that in a minute), you don’t want a person to get confused and get the wrong book instead.

Research Your Title Ideas

It’s a good idea to take the titles you have considered for your book and make a list. Then, do your homework. You can use tools like Google Adwords to test out your title to see if there are others like it, or you can simply use any search engine and plug your title ideas into the search bar and see what similar or exact titles of the same words pop up.

Readers are generally busy people. They don’t have the time or the energy to ensure that writers get a title right. They’ll look for the book they are interested in, and if it proves to be too difficult, or if there are other books written that have the same title, they’ll move on to something else.

A writer really has to make sure that they have a title that isn’t going to be ignored, is interesting, isn’t too long, and isn’t too similar to other works.

The same goes for titles of short works within a larger body of work. Short works, like poems or stories, need to have unique titles as well when included in a larger body of work, such as a collection. If stories are similar in nature, be sure to title them differently so that readers will be able to tell them apart, as well.

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How Handwriting Lost Its Personality

B ecause I am a writer, and because I am a hoarder, my apartment is littered with notebooks that contain a mixture of journal entries and school assignments. Many pages don’t have dates, but I can tell which era of my life they correspond to just by looking at the handwriting. In the earliest examples, from elementary school, my print is angular, jagged; even the s ’s and j ’s turn sharp corners. In middle school, when I wanted to be more feminine (and was otherwise failing), I made my letters rounder, every curve a bubble ready to pop. In my junior year of high school, when it was time to get serious about applying to college, I switched to cursive, slender and tightly controlled.

Each of my metamorphoses was made in keeping with a centuries-old American belief that people— types of people, even—can be defined by how they write their letters. Now, though, this form of signaling may be obsolete. In the age of text on screens, many of us hardly write by hand at all, so we rarely get the chance to assess one another’s character through penmanship. Handwriting, as a language of its own, is dying out.

Over the centuries, the way people read that language has shifted. Until the 1800s, at least in the U.S., writing styles were less an act of self-expression than a marker of your social category, including your profession . “There were certain font types for merchants, for example, that were supposed to reflect the efficiency and the speed with which merchants work,” Tamara Plakins Thornton, a historian at the University at Buffalo and the author of Handwriting in America , told me. Lawyers used a different script, aristocrats another, and so on. The distinctions were enforced—by social norms, by teachers, by clients and colleagues and employers.

Men and women, too, were assigned their own fonts. Men were taught “muscular handwriting,” Carla Peterson, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland, told me. They used roundhand, a larger script that was meant to be produced with more pressure on the quill or pen; women, by contrast, learned the narrower Italian script, akin to today’s italics. The latter style was compressed, says Ewan Clayton, a handwriting expert at the University of Sunderland, in the United Kingdom, in the same way that women’s waists might be limited by contemporary fashion. Eventually, women switched to using roundhand too.

[ From the February 1859 issue: Ought women to learn the alphabet? ]

The idea that handwriting styles might differ meaningfully from one person to another—and that those differences could be a means of showing your true nature—really took off in the 19th century, around the time that business correspondence and records started being outsourced to the typewriter. As penmanship was freed from professional constraints, it became more personal. “It was really believed that handwriting could be the articulation of self, that indeed the character of script said something about the character of a person,” says Mark Alan Mattes, an assistant English professor at the University of Louisville and the editor of the upcoming collection Handwriting in Early America .

Nowhere was that belief better exemplified than in the field of graphology—basically, phrenology for handwriting. In the 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe (who was taken with all manner of scientific measurements ) published his analyses of the signatures of more than 100 writers, and how their lines and squiggles corresponded to each writer’s prose style. Of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s autograph, he wrote, “We see here plain indications of the force, vigour, and glowing richness of his literary style; the deliberate and steady finish of his compositions.” Poe was not as kind to the poet Lydia Sigourney: “From [the signature] of Mrs. S. we might easily form a true estimate of her compositions. Freedom, dignity, precision, and grace, without originality, may be properly attributed to her. She has fine taste, without genius.” An 1892 guide to graphology is more systematic, informing readers that people who connect all their letters at the base are “purely deductive” in their reasoning, while those whose letters have some elbow room are “purely intuitive.”

Graphological tendencies continued into the early 20th century, when researchers published studies proclaiming that readers could guess a person’s gender from their script with better-than-chance accuracy—as if students hadn’t still been taught that boys and girls should write in different ways as of just a few decades prior. Through the 1970s, scientists were plumbing handwriting for character traits; one study found that “missing i dots are related to the nonsubmissive, non-egocentric, socially interested person,” whereas the “number of circled i dots relates positively to the intelligent and sophisticated personality.”

Handwriting analysis moved further toward the fringe in the age of computer connectivity, when typing took over. “We are witnessing the death of handwriting,” Time proclaimed in 2009. Things have only gotten more digital since then. I now spend half of my waking life talking with my co-workers, and I have no idea what any of their writing looks like. Same for the subset of my friends who don’t happen to send birthday cards. One of my best friends is getting married next year, and I have never seen her fiancé’s handwriting. How am I supposed to know whether he tends toward deduction or intuition, whether he’s intelligent or socially interested, whether he’s an artist or a serial killer ?

Let me be clear: Graphology is, as Thornton told me, “complete B.S.” Very few innate factors influence a person’s penmanship. Neither legibility nor messiness indicates intelligence. (Both claims have been made.) Handwriting can be used to diagnose conditions that affect a person’s movements, such as Parkinson’s , but you can’t learn anything about a person’s moral fiber by how they cross their t ’s. What you can learn is how that person has been socialized to present themselves to the world, says Seth Perlow, an associate English professor at Georgetown. Doctors have a culture of sloppy writing; teen girls have a culture of dotting their i ’s with tiny hearts. Girls don’t write that way because they’re feminine; they write that way because they’ve learned that tiny hearts are associated with femininity.  

[ Read: How the ballpoint pen killed cursive ]

I remember practicing my letters as a kid when I got bored in class, adjusting the parts I didn’t like, adding and removing the belts from my 7 s, the caps from my a ’s. Testing out a new style was like trying on a new outfit in front of a mirror—assessing how it looked, knowing other people would see it too. Now, as handwriting becomes less and less enmeshed in our daily lives, Thornton told me, “there’s good reason to think this is not an arena for self-expression. It’s just something you have to learn and get away with as best you can.” If you want to assert your identity, and you want people to see it, you’re more likely to do so by sculpting your appearance, adding your pronouns to your Instagram bio, or updating LinkedIn so everyone knows you’re a merchant without having to decipher your chicken scratch.

In fact, many of the qualities that were once conveyed with a certain type of handwriting—literary bent or emotional openness, for example—may now be conveyed by the act of putting pen to paper at all. Perlow has studied the practice of posting photos of handwritten poems on Instagram, and he told me that it “conjures a feeling of personal authenticity or expressiveness or direct contact with the personality of the poet.”

Tech companies have even tried to sell that feeling, in the form of computer-generated “handwriting.” Services such as Handwrytten, Simply Noted, and Pen Letters allow customers to type out a message that a robot will then transcribe, using an actual pen, in any number of “handwriting” styles. (The robot-written letter is then mailed on your behalf.) But these tools run the risk of conjuring less a sense of personal authenticity than one of inconsiderate laziness. If a friend or family member sent me one of these cards, I’d be annoyed that they didn’t put in the time, or the work, to write out a message with their own, human hand.

[ From the October 2022 issue: Gen Z never learned to read cursive ]

Perhaps that’s really what handwriting comes down to in the digital age: time and work. My husband and I write letters to each other a few times every year, and it’s a grueling act of love. Figuring out what I want to say is an emotional and intellectual project. But after a few paragraphs, the challenge becomes mostly physical. The muscles of my right palm start to cramp up; my ring finger aches from where I rest the pen against it. I’d like to think my determination to write through the discomfort says more about me than the script I settled on a decade ago.

For 47 years, a lesbian-owned restaurant has put politics on the menu

Founded by a collective in 1978, Bloodroot is the last remaining example of a 1970s and ’80s wave of feminist restaurants.

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — Tucked away in a quiet residential neighborhood in coastal Connecticut is a revolution disguised as a restaurant — or maybe the other way around.

A sign on the side of the building facing the street clearly states Bloodroot’s ethos: “a feminist restaurant and bookstore with a seasonal vegetarian menu.” A calico cat named Gloria Steinem keeps a watchful eye over the dining room; her late sister was named Bella Abzug. Since 1978, diners have stepped over the threshold to find themselves enveloped by the inclusive yet pro-female culture created by the Bloodroot Collective, a group of feminist and lesbian activists from the Bridgeport community seeking to put women’s issues at the center of the plate.

“We wanted to create a place where women could feel happy and safe, and even now, we have young women who tell us how struck they are by the impact it has had on them,” says Noel Furie, one of the two remaining original members of the collective, which began with four women. “Who knew we would be here for 47 years?”

For Furie, now 79, and Selma Miriam, 89, Bloodroot’s co-owners, the goal was to build a self-sustaining feminist community that would embrace global cuisine and where women, lesbian and straight, could feel supported. The concept appears to have worked as today’s diners eat platters of housemade injera and misir wat beneath hundreds of vintage photographs of women, picked up at yard sales and donated by friends, that line the walls. A handwritten notice reads: “Because all women are victims of fat oppression and out of respect for women of size, we would appreciate your refraining from agonizing aloud over the calorie count in our food. (Ask to see ‘Shadow on a Tightrope’ or ‘The Obsession.’)” On the other side of the dining room, you will, indeed, find these feminist books and others on the shelves of the bookstore, a lesser focus now in the age of online booksellers .

Even so, it’s that business diversity that Alex Ketchum , assistant professor at McGill University’s Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, sees as key to Bloodroot’s longevity. “It’s a volatile industry that requires multiple streams of revenue to survive,” Ketchum says. “Feminist restaurants often included bookstores and performance spaces, built networks for artists and worked to ensure that employees were compensated with a living wage,” she says. But of the 200-plus feminist restaurants, cafes and coffeehouses that opened across the United States during the 1970s and ’80s, as identified by Ketchum when researching her 2022 book, “Ingredients for Revolution,” just one remains: Bloodroot.

The inspiration for such an enterprise began with Mother Courage , a women’s liberation-centered restaurant widely acknowledged as the first of its kind when it launched in New York City in 1972, just six years before Bloodroot opened its doors. Women were still unable to get a business loan without male co-signers — that would take until 1988, when the Women’s Business Ownership Act was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan — so such ventures necessarily involved a shared vision and often personal loans, between women, whether they were fellow activists, friends or lovers.

These spaces were pivotal to women in the early years of both the gay rights movement following the 1969 Stonewall riots and the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966. At Mother Courage, small acts such as pouring wine for women to sample and placing the check equidistant from male and female diners were surprisingly revolutionary. Bloodroot, too, struck a chord among its own local female clientele: “Women would come in and whisper about their issues,” Furie recalls. “I feel very honored to be a part of that.”

Ketchum sees a modern evolution of the original concept: “There’s changing terminology now, because we don’t really have political lesbianism anymore. There are places today that tend to be queer and not tied to the idea of gender. The feminist restaurants were tied to these networks by national periodicals and typically most accountable to their local communities, while today’s businesses are held accountable by a broader international audience — people who may never have even been to these places. It brings a different kind of pressure to the structure.”

Furie sees that evolution herself but is quick to note it was the feminist movement that opened the door to many legal rights for both women and LGBTQ+ communities. “The words ‘feminist’ and ‘lesbian’ seem to be out of style now,” she says, “but we love them as an expression of strength. We didn’t follow any rules for women and we were successful, and we think that example shows that you can follow your values and survive, no matter what community you identify with.”

The route to both feminism and plant-based cooking came to Furie and Miriam in different ways. Miriam refers to her own mother as having been a “rabid feminist and a Jewish atheist. The food in feminism came from an ethical culture and anti-religious beliefs — because I was raised with feminism, it was easy for me to understand that food culture.”

Furie, on the other hand, was raised by a mother with no interest in feminism. “She was very into women being beautiful,” Furie says, “and I had no language to describe that discomfort. Feminism gave me the language.” Among the photos of women on Bloodroot’s walls is one of Furie as a little girl, frowning in a decidedly feminine dress. “That dress is what made me a feminist,” she says. “My mother made me wear it and I absolutely hated it, but I had no choice but to wear it, no opportunity to say no.”

Each woman found herself in a traditional heterosexual marriage before becoming involved in conscious-raising groups within the lesbian and feminist movements, providing the catalyst to come out as lesbians, divorce and follow new paths. “It was a jump off the cliff, like Thelma and Louise ,” Furie says. “The thing about Bloodroot is that we just jumped out of the culture at large, right out of the patriarchy. We were desperate, so we just left our lives as we knew them and created this whole new life.”

The Bloodroot Collective initially pursued opening a bookstore alone, but Miriam’s interest in cooking led to the idea of opening a restaurant in tandem. The building they found, a former machine shop overlooking picturesque Brewster Cove in Bridgeport’s Black Rock neighborhood, provided a rambling canvas for bringing their vision to life. They built an open window between the kitchen and the dining room, and implemented a self-serve policy so that employees did not have to be dependent upon tips for income. Leading feminists visited regularly, including Audre Lorde , who debuted such works there as the famous essay “My Mother’s Mortar.” A women-only night every Wednesday drew women from across the area, lining up outside to get in.

“The women-only night eventually died,” Miriam says. “It was just suddenly out of style. But then there were men coming in pushing strollers, and that astonished me. There was a time when you just never would have seen that.”

At the center of it all, Miriam and Furie were determined to serve thoughtfully prepared vegetarian food in rhythm with what was seasonally available, while learning from and celebrating the food cultures of the women working with them at Bloodroot: Jamaican, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Korean, Honduran. Miriam was committed to also sharing that knowledge, saying now, “If someone wants to know how to make something, then I’m going to teach them.” That belief led to the publication of Bloodroot’s first cookbook in 1980, “The Political Palate,” which the collective created under its own imprint after a publishing company expressed interest in the book — but only if the title was changed. “The early books were considered very radical,” Miriam says with a chuckle.

Indeed, the collective did not shy away from expressing its views, writing, “We are feminists, that is, we recognize that women are oppressed by patriarchy — the rule of the fathers — and we commit ourselves to rebellion against that patriarchy. … Our food is vegetarian because we are feminists. We oppose the keeping and killing of animals for the pleasure of the palate just as we oppose men controlling abortion or sterilization.”

Lagusta Yearwood was 21 in 2000, when she started working at Bloodroot. “When I first got there, I thought it would be this Earth-mama-’60s-granola-thing, but it was so much more complex,” she says. “When you are unapologetic about who you are, it draws people to you. These are two people who have taken any kind of privilege they’ve had in life and really used it to benefit thousands of others.” Yearwood, who lives in Upstate New York, worked with Bloodroot over the course of 10 years, including writing two cookbooks with the collective and gaining experience that she used to open Lagusta’s Luscious (a name she says was coined by Miriam), a vegan artisanal chocolate company with two locations.

“Bloodroot is such an institution,” Yearwood says, “and Selma and Noel were so open and giving with all of their knowledge and life beliefs.”

Perhaps inspired by Yearwood’s passion for veganism, Furie and Miriam found themselves experimenting more with vegan options, transitioning Bloodroot to a plant-based menu. “We already had great vegetarian food,” Miriam says, “but when the pandemic struck, we stopped serving brunch, and that allowed us to get rid of eggs entirely from the menu.”

The menu choices on any given night might be as varied as Cambodian kanji made with rice, potatoes and cashews; Jamaican jerk seitan with coconut rice; and a creamy mushroom walnut paté served with potato-rye bread. A large glass jar on the kitchen counter contains brandied fruit that has been continually replenished with fruit and sugar since the restaurant opened — yes, 47 years and counting — to spoon over homemade cashew-based ice cream.

Carolanne Curry, a longtime friend, sits at the large wooden desk by the front door, welcoming diners on a recent Thursday night. She explains the self-serve system to newcomers and catches up with returning customers visiting the area after a long absence. Gesturing to the eclectic array of artwork, handmade quilts and stacks of feminist literature that make up the cozy atmosphere, Curry says, “This place is like a kaleidoscope. You look at it and you see one thing. Then you shift everything just slightly, and you can see something new.”

Furie says she thinks the supercharged estrogen in the restaurant’s atmosphere is what makes it a comfortable place where people keep returning, even though it is a bit off the beaten track. Despite the divisiveness so pervasive in today’s political dialogue, Bloodroot prides itself on being a safe haven for many viewpoints. “Anybody who wants to be here is welcome here,” she says. “I used to think everyone had to think like me, but I’ve changed my mind about that.”

For Miriam, Bloodroot is, perhaps, her lifeblood, even as she now spends less time in the kitchen and more time chatting with customers while sitting with Gloria Steinem — the cat, that is. “There are people who come in with their 3-year-old and say, ‘I came here when I was 3, and now I’m back with my child,’ and I think how amazing that we had that impact, without even planning it. We followed our political and social beliefs, and had an appreciation for the earth and the animals — all the things that fall under the broad umbrella of feminism. There are so many threads to feminism, but here at Bloodroot, we do respect and love life.”

A previous version of this story misquoted Alex Ketchum of McGill University as referring to “political feminism.” The term she used was “political lesbianism.” This version has been corrected.

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The Words That Defined Closing Arguments in Donald Trump’s Trial

Defense lawyers and prosecutors deployed their best lines to win jurors to their side. The panel of 12 New Yorkers then went behind closed doors.

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By Wesley Parnell

Reporting from the courthouse

• May 30, 2024

After more than six taxing weeks of Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial on felony charges of falsifying business records, lawyers presented their closing arguments on Tuesday and the case was moved into the hands of 12 jurors the next day.

Prosecutors worked meticulously on Tuesday to remind the jury of documents and evidence they maintain support their case that the former president falsified 34 financial records to conceal a hush money payment to a porn star before the 2016 election. A lawyer for Mr. Trump argued there wasn’t a “shred of evidence” that tied Mr. Trump to the scheme, which prosecutors said was meant to conceal an extramarital tryst from voters.

Both parties, in a court day that stretched well into the evening, focused on Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer, who became the prime witness against him.

Mr. Trump has denied the charges and the sexual encounter, and said money paid to Mr. Cohen was not reimbursement for the hush payment but legitimate legal expenses. If convicted, Mr. Trump faces probation or prison.

Here are the most memorable words uttered during the summations:

‘Michael Cohen is the G.L.O.A.T.’

Todd Blanche, one of Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers, spent a substantial portion of his closing argument attacking the credibility of Mr. Cohen, who had been the defendant’s former personal attorney.

“He’s the human embodiment of reasonable doubt,” said Mr. Blanche in his nearly three-hour summation. “An M.V.P. of liars,” he added.

The defense has tried to cast Mr. Cohen as a jaded employee bent on exacting revenge from the man he once called “ the boss .”

Mr. Blanche presented jurors with the sports-world acronym of G.O.A.T., saying that quarterback Tom Brady was the “greatest of all time.”

He paused. “Michael Cohen is the G.L.O.A.T. He’s literally the Greatest Liar of All Time!” said Mr. Blanche, his voice rising.

“It doesn’t matter if there was a conspiracy.”

Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen plotted alongside David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, to boost flattering stories about Mr. Trump and quash those that made him look bad.

But Mr. Blanche revived an argument from opening statements last month: There is nothing wrong with influencing an election. Mr. Blanche impressed upon jurors the realpolitik idea that it is common for candidates to bend public opinion to help them win.

“Every campaign in this country is a conspiracy,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if there was a conspiracy to try to win an election.”

‘The smoking guns’

For more than five hours, Joshua Steinglass, a prosecutor, made his case to the jury.

Mr. Steinglass flipped through business records from the Trump Organization that contained handwritten notes from two of Mr. Trump’s top moneymen, which prosecutors said outlined the mechanism to reimburse Mr. Cohen.

“They are the smoking guns,” Mr. Steinglass said.

The documents “completely blow out of the water the claim the money paid to Cohen was for legal services,” he added.

Mr. Steinglass also named former and current employees of Mr. Trump who had testified.

“These people like the defendant. If anything, they have an incentive to skew their testimony in a way that would help the defendant,” said Mr. Steinglass . “Yet, each of them provides critical pieces of the puzzle, building blocks that help establish the defendant’s guilt.”

‘He made his bed.’

In attempts to shore up Mr. Cohen’s credibility, Mr. Steinglass crafted an image of him as a product of the Trump Organization who provided a crucial look into its inner workings.

“We didn’t choose Michael Cohen to be our witness. We didn’t pick him up at the witness store,” said Mr. Steinglass. “The defendant chose Michael Cohen to be his fixer, because he was willing to lie and cheat on Mr. Trump’s behalf.”

The prosecutor said that Mr. Trump hired Mr. Cohen precisely because he was willing to behave in unscrupulous ways.

“Mr. Trump chose Mr. Cohen for the same qualities that his attorneys now urge you to reject his testimony because of,” said Mr. Steinglass.

He told jurors they did not have to feel sympathetic to Mr. Cohen to believe him. “I’m not asking you to feel bad for Michael Cohen,” Mr. Steinglass said. “He made his bed.”

Our Coverage of the Trump Hush-Money Trial

Guilty Verdict : Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 counts  of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened his bid for the White House in 2016, making him the first American president to be declared a felon .

What Happens Next: Trump’s sentencing hearing on July 11 will trigger a long and winding appeals process , though he has few ways to overturn the decision .

Reactions: Trump’s conviction reverberated quickly across the country  and around the world . Here’s what voters , New Yorkers , Republicans , Trump supporters  and President Biden  had to say.

The Presidential Race : The political fallout of Trump’s conviction is far from certain , but the verdict will test America’s traditions, legal institutions and ability to hold an election under historic partisan tension .

Making the Case: Over six weeks and the testimony of 20 witnesses, the Manhattan district attorney’s office wove a sprawling story  of election interference and falsified business records.

Legal Luck Runs Out: The four criminal cases that threatened Trump’s freedom had been stumbling along, pleasing his advisers. Then his good fortune expired .